Torch

  “Our mom was a teen mom,” he’d said to Claire when she was done with her statistics, believing he had an unassailable defense.

  But she just shook her head, smiled at him incisively, and whispered, “Precisely my point.”

  Despite everything, Claire had quickly warmed to the idea of being an aunt, and not only an aunt but also something of a stand-in for Joshua while he was in jail. She was the one who accompanied Lisa to her prenatal appointments, who gave her books to read about pregnancy and what to do when the baby arrived. She’d even volunteered to be a replacement for Joshua at Lisa’s labor and birth class and, as a gift to them, paid the tuition in full. Joshua would be released on March 5—two weeks before the baby was due—and Claire would tell him all the things she’d learned at the class that he’d need to know, so during the birth he could be of use.

  “It’s over at the hospital—the birth class,” Claire said to him now. They both glanced toward the windows near the ceiling, from which they could see the sidewalk above them and the shoes of a rare passerby, and beyond that, but only if they got a chair and climbed on top of it to look out, the Blue River Hospital directly across the street, where Joshua and Lisa’s baby would be born. They’d not learned the gender, wanting it to be a surprise.

  “We’ll wave at you,” she said. “It gets over at four o’clock.”

  “How will I see you?” he asked, sharp irritation in his voice. It angered him when she pretended that things were not as they were.

  “I meant, if you’re in here and you look out the window.” She pressed her hands against the edge of the table as if she were attempting to slide her chair back, but it stayed anchored in its place, drilled into the floor.

  “Well, I won’t be.”

  “I meant if you were, Josh.”

  “But the point is I won’t.”

  “Okay. You won’t.” She crossed her legs, her knees bumping against the bottom of the table. When she was settled she asked, “What’s your problem today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” she said tentatively. “Then don’t wave at us. I was just trying to be nice. I was trying to include you, for your information.”

  Their eyes locked for a moment, then they each looked away, disgusted with each other. The room was large and open, the carpet like a field across its center. Despite the long table at which they sat with its bolts and metal loops for handcuffs, it had the feel of a kindergarten classroom. There was a sink and a cupboard, a terrarium filled with stones and small desert plants, and off in the corner a big chair with a floral-patterned fabric and a couch covered in dark green plaid that surrounded a coffee table scattered with magazines and plants and a box of Kleenex. It was called the “community room,” the room where most things in Joshua’s new jail life happened. It was where on Tuesday afternoons he, along with his fellow inmates, met with Pat McCredy for what she called “group,” and where, every Thursday afternoon, he met with Pat McCredy for what she called “individual.” And also where twice a week he took his exercise class, which was, to Joshua’s great relief, not conducted by Pat McCredy, but by a shifting series of people who volunteered for a program whose sole concern was the physical fitness of inmates. Sometimes it was yoga, other times step aerobics or a thing that all of the inmates dreaded called “NIA,” a new aerobics crossbreed that required of its participants periodic interludes of free-form dance improvisation. Joshua refused to improvise and instead kept his eyes on the instructor during these parts, attempting reluctantly to mimic her frenzy and pass it off as his own. On occasion no instructor showed up and whatever guard was on duty would wheel out the TV and VCR and put the exercise tape in—they had only one, Hips, Abs, and Buns—and then stand by to make sure everyone participated. By state law, they had to exercise two hours each week.

  “I always feel like I should bring something,” Claire said, breaking their silence, making the kind of unspoken truce they made over and over and over again all of their lives, to have their arguments and then to move on. “A cake or something.” A mischievous smile came over her face. “Somewhere to hide the file or the razor blades or whatever.” She spoke louder than necessary, so as to include Tommy Johnson, who stood guard just inside the locked door, listening to every word they said, and also to indicate that she was only joking. Tommy didn’t move, didn’t smile, didn’t appear to have even heard Claire, though they knew he had. She turned back to Joshua and more quietly asked, “So, have you seen Bruce?”

  “Not since he came that one time.”

  “He came into Len’s on Wednesday. He said he’d visit you soon.” In her voice he detected a slight tilt, a microscopic embarrassment over the facts of her life now: not only that she worked as a waitress, but also that she lived in Midden, working at the very bar that their mother had. Claire Wood—teachers, the people at the bank, the people he used to sell drugs to, everyone in the town, they all said to him in that same voice, the voice that contained their pride and contempt, their scorn and unmasked joy, they said it like a chant—Your sister is Claire Wood? Now there’s a girl who will go far. When people asked what she was doing these days, she told them she was in transition, waiting to see what she really wanted to do, saving her money in the meanwhile.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Fine, I guess.” She looked up at him, the veil he had come to recognize whenever they spoke of Bruce falling over her eyes. “He’s starting to look … weird.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. Just different. Hipper maybe. Not actually hip, but more updated. Like suddenly he cares what he looks like.”

  Joshua put his fingers into the metal loop on the table through which the chain of the handcuffs had been strung while he’d been handcuffed. He ached for a cigarette. “I think it’s very funny,” he said.

  “What?” Her eyes cut sharply to him.

  “Everything.” Then added, “Bruce.” They sat in silence together for several minutes, neither of them wanting to get into what they’d come to refer to as “the whole Bruce thing,” but also not able to think of anything else to talk about at the moment.

  “You’ll never guess what,” Claire said at last.

  “What?”

  “I saw a moose. Driving here. On the road. I took the shortcut across and there it was right in the middle of the road.” She shrugged and looked away, as if she realized that seeing a moose was something that in fact he could have guessed.

  “That’s good luck,” he said.

  “It is?”

  “Yeah.”

  She pushed her hair back behind her ears. It was shorter than it had ever been, cut into a bob above her chin and colored with a remotely maroon henna dye that would allegedly fade out naturally over time.

  “I always thought it was a white horse. If you saw a white horse it’s good luck.”

  “A moose too,” he blurted. “Any wild animal. And also white horses.” He realized that he could not be sure if indeed it was good luck to see a moose, but he wasn’t going to admit that now.

  “Well, good. We could use some luck.” She reached out again and squeezed his hand. Her hands were cold, all of her life she’d had cold hands and cold feet. Her sock had started to burn once, smoke coiling out of a black hole while it was still on her foot after she’d held it too long and too close to the wood stove.

  “Did you make a wish when you saw it?” he asked, immediately regretting he had. His mouth had grown dry. She’d been there for twenty-five minutes. In five more minutes Tommy would tell her it was time to leave. At this point in the visit he found himself almost always wishing that whoever had come to visit him was already gone so he wouldn’t have to spend five minutes with the knowledge that soon they would be.

  “Of course I didn’t,” she said. “How was I supposed to know to make a wish if I didn’t know it was good luck to begin with?”

  “You should have known. Now it isn’t good luck,” he said, without sympathy.

  “Fuck
you,” she whispered somewhat sweetly, somewhat honestly angry. She drew an invisible spiral on the surface of the table with her index finger. “You always do that, Josh,” she said, her face going serious, her hand going still.

  “Do what?”

  She looked away, toward one of the windows, where a dry yellow leaf that had somehow managed to survive the winter scuttled against its surface, trapped between the glass and the bars, then she turned her eyes back onto him, so bright, so large.

  “Ruin everything.”

  Nine was the number of inmates at the jail during the months of Joshua’s imprisonment, though only eight actually lived there. The ninth was a woman named Tiffany—the lone woman among them—who was housed, like all the rare female inmates, in a locked room in the basement of the hospital. For meals and visitors and for all the mandatory activities except exercise the guards brought her from the hospital to the jail in handcuffs, following an underground passageway that ran below the street. A different section of this same passageway was the one that Claire had walked down to visit Joshua, and it continued on to connect a series of buildings: the courthouse to the jail, the jail to the hospital, the hospital to the nursing home, and the nursing home back to the courthouse. At lunchtime on days when the weather was too hot or too cold, too rainy or icy or windy, the women who worked in the buildings through which the underground hallway passed did loops, walking fast together or alone, wearing sneakers and leggings with giant T-shirts that covered their behinds. If Joshua was in his cell, he could not see them pass by, but he could hear their footsteps and voices, echoing in the tunnel.

  His cell was not as bad as he had expected. It was not dank and chilly and dark; sludge-filled cracks did not line the floors. Instead the floor was seamless and shiny, painted periwinkle. The periwinkle extended from the floor to midway up the wall and ended in an undulating border meant to suggest the ocean. From the edge of this sea, the wall was painted sky blue, as was the ceiling, which featured, in the far corner, a bright yellow sun with eyes and a mouth that smiled endlessly down upon him. The feel was not so much of a jail cell but of a neatly arranged cabin on a ship. Two cots sat on opposite walls, with a toilet behind a small panel in between them at the far end. At the head of the cots, both Joshua and his cellmate had a two-by-three-foot table that was bolted to the wall and a bench bolted to the floor before it. Above the table there was a small cabinet where they could store their belongings—they were each allowed a few small things. Joshua had his sketchbook and a sweater that his mother had knit that itched him, and a photo of Lisa holding her cat, Jasmine, in a vinyl frame that folded up and snapped closed.

  His cellmate, to Joshua’s great surprise, turned out to be Vern Milkkinen—the Chicken Man—his old coworker at the Midden Café. It hadn’t occurred to Joshua that he’d been absent from his regular post in the Midden Dairy Queen parking lot the entire summer before. The Vern whom Joshua knew in jail was not the Vern he’d known at the café. At sixty-six, he had found religion. He was a new man, a reformed man, Pat McCredy’s model inmate. Vern had been busted for driving drunk so many times, he’d been sentenced to a year. He’d be released a couple of months after Joshua. In the time that Vern had served before Joshua’s arrival he had found God, vowed to never drink a drop of alcohol again, and written long letters addressed to everyone he loved, trying to make amends. To his son, Andrew, to his sister, Geraldine, and to his wife, even though by now she was dead.

  In jail Joshua’s mornings had a rhythm: at seven he would be awakened and escorted along with his fellow inmates to the shower; after showering and dressing they were led to the small dining room off the kitchen to eat. Tiffany would be there already, her wet hair falling forward, making a shield across her face as she bent over her bowl of oatmeal. After breakfast his job was to clean his half of the cell from top to bottom, including the walls and floor and ceiling on his side. Vern cleaned the other half. It kept them both occupied for a good thirty minutes each day and gave their cell—the hallway of four cells in a row—the persistent aroma of ammonia, a scent that Joshua associated always with his mother during the years when she had worked at the Rest-A-While Villa and come home smelling of it. When the cleaning was done, they had two hours in their cells for what was called “self-reflection.” In the schedule that was taped to the wall in the community room there was a note of explanation written in this time slot, most likely, Joshua believed, composed by Pat McCredy: “Two hours in which you may reflect upon what it is that brought you here and where it is you may go after you leave.”

  Seldom did Joshua reflect upon what brought him here, though often he thought about where he would go after he left and that was straight to Lisa’s bed, though he could not think of this too long or in too detailed a manner since Vern lay self-reflecting in his cot only a few feet away. What brought him to the jail was hardly worth a thought. Greg Price had found the bag of marijuana he kept in a tackle box in his truck. It could have been worse; he didn’t have to be told. Greg Price could have found the Baggie full of the crystal meth that he had in an empty thermal mug in his glove compartment when he was stopped—a discovery that would have made it impossible for anyone to deny intent to sell, which would have put him in a different, more serious, criminal category and would have landed him not in the Coltrap County jail, but a state or federal prison most likely in St. Paul. He’d held his breath as Greg lifted the Thermos and shook it, listening to hear if anything moved inside, and then he tossed it back where it had been. Later, after he’d been arrested and Claire had come and paid his bail, he’d thrown the crystal meth into the Mississippi River, out behind Len’s Lookout, wanting to make Vivian and Bender pay in at least this small way.

  In the end he had not been charged with dealing marijuana because his attorney had convinced everyone involved of what, in fact, was true: that bag of marijuana in the tackle box had been only for Joshua’s personal use. It had helped that the judge was a regular customer at Len’s Lookout and had known his mother; it had helped that Bruce had built the cabinets that sat in the judge’s kitchen. At his hearing it was agreed that Joshua would go to jail for eighty-five days and be on probation for a year afterward, waiving a trial or a right to appeal. He signed the papers in the judge’s chambers of the Coltrap County Courthouse with his attorney standing next to him—Lisa and Claire were waiting out in the hall. Immediately afterward, he was led away in handcuffs, past Lisa and Claire, who both gasped and wept upon seeing him, down a staircase to the basement, to the underground hallway that took him to the processing room where the little paper man dressed in black marker held vigil, and then past him, to the locked world beyond, to jail.

  The afternoons in the jail were great fields of time, punctuated by group or individual, exercise or visitors, or nothing at all, in which case Joshua would convince one of the guards to give him a pen or pencil so he could sit at the tiny table in his cell and draw. Vern would be next to him, reading his Bible, which he read so often that it was no longer a book but a stack of pages that he had to keep in a shoebox that Pat McCredy had brought in for him, which had once contained a pair of her many Birkenstocks.

  Joshua now knew a great deal about Vern from the two hours they spent together each week in group. Hour one was called “sharing,” hour two was “moving beyond.” Often moving beyond got cut short because sharing ran so long. Sharing did not run long because the inmates sat down with much desire to share, but because Pat McCredy was so insistent about—and, Joshua had to admit, good at—forcing things out of each of them. With Vern, at least by the time Joshua came along, she didn’t have to work too hard. He told them about how he used to hit his wife and son, about his own childhood growing up on a dairy farm that his family no longer owned, about the death of his father by tractor, about his mother who drank herself into a stupor all through his childhood and then killed herself accidentally by lighting her bed on fire with a fallen cigarette when he was sixteen. He told them about his twin brother who was mentally ret
arded, and who still lived, as it turned out, in the very nursing home across the street—he’d lived there for almost fifty years, ever since their mother died. Joshua listened to this without looking at Vern, seeing him only peripherally in his assigned seat immediately to the left, though sometimes he had to turn and face him whenever Pat McCredy demanded that it be so, when she had an exercise for them to do, as she often did, between sharing and moving beyond.

  “I want you to go back,” she said to them one day, “to what you dreamed for yourself when you were a kid.” She inhaled a big breath and closed her eyes and slowly exhaled her breath as if she were meditating all alone in a room.

  In the silence, Joshua gazed at Tiffany, who sat directly across the circle from him, studying the ends of her hair in one section and then another, delicately tugging strands of it from time to time to snap off a split end. She was somewhat bitchy and just okay-looking, but she moved him anyway, the pure sight of her: the feast of her face, her mannish hands and flat chest, her plush hips and butt that seemed to have absorbed all the fat that refused to settle anywhere else. She was older than him, twenty-eight, and he felt more sorry for her than he did all the men combined—not only did she have to reveal her innermost feelings, but she also had to reveal them to a bunch of men in jail. All she’d done was write bad checks.

  “Let’s do this together, folks,” Pat McCredy said without opening her eyes. “Let us all remember together when we were kids. Let’s go back there. What did we want for ourselves?” She opened her eyes and stood and made her way slowly around their circle of nine chairs. She was at least six feet tall, her brown hair dim with gray and pulled back in a thin braid. Her shoulders were wide and hard-looking; her hips squarish and flabby, hoisted a few inches too high, it seemed, by her impossibly long legs. The overall effect was that she was part woman, part something else, part horse or buffalo. She wore a green turtleneck and green tights beneath an enormous beige smock that went down past her knees, her feet in purple Birkenstocks. From the loose pocket at the front of the smock she took a stack of tiny squares of construction paper and made her way around the circle, handing them each one piece, instructing them to write one of their childhood dreams. They had pens already, and journals she’d given them and forced them to decorate with finger paint and glitter, colored markers and crayons. Pat McCredy was big on writing things down. The journals, they could keep to themselves; with the pieces of paper anything could happen, but most often what happened is that they were collected by Pat McCredy, who used them as what she called “starting points” in individual.